Everybody knew about it, said Dean and Mary Simpson. It was openly discussed. The Richmond public schools wanted to keep white parents happy. Whites had been fleeing in droves since a federal court ordered the schools to desegregate in 1970. To lure them back, school officials offered special treatment. Mary Simpson describes how they did it.

Petersburg High will play its entire 1992 football season on the road because gunshots at a home game last year frightened students and parents. School Superintendent Willis B. McLeod said the school decided to abandon Cameron Field to ensure the safety of students and players. He also said the move was linked to poor ticket sales in recent years. "It was not a decision reached easily," McLeod said Wednesday. No one was injured when a gun discharged at a home game Oct. 25.

Jean Harris, the onetime headmistress of an elite girls' school whose trial in the fatal 1980 shooting of the celebrity diet doctor who jilted her generated front-page headlines and national debates about whether she was a feminist martyr or vengeful murderer, has died. She was 89. Harris, who spent nearly 12 years in prison for the shooting death of her longtime boyfriend, "Scarsdale Diet" doctor Herman "Hy" Tarnower, died Sunday at an assisted-living facility in New Haven, Conn., of complications related to old age, her son James said.

Angelica Garza and Amy Abraham are spending the weekend at Virginia Military Institute to learn what life will be like as "Sister Rats." VMI's first male-female open house since deciding to admit women a month ago included a tour of the 157-year-old campus, a night spent on wooden cots--and television cameras, of course. "I don't see what the big deal is," Abraham said. "We're just normal people who are wanting to look at a great college." The U.S.

President Obama, "heartbroken" by the unfolding tragedy in Japan, reiterated Monday that the United States stood ready to support its ally in the aftermath of Friday’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. "The United States will continue to offer any assistance we can as Japan continues to recover from multiple disasters," Obama said. His remarks came at a Virginia middle school, the latest event in what the White House has called "Education Month. " The president used Monday’s event to call on Congress to reauthorize "No Child Left Behind" before the start of the next school year.

A former Virginia high school valedictorian held in a Saudi Arabian prison for 20 months was accused in federal court Tuesday of conspiring with Al Qaeda to assassinate President Bush. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, an American citizen, and at least 10 unidentified co-conspirators allegedly planned in 2002 and 2003 to kill Bush either by shooting him or by detonating a car bomb, according to an indictment released at a hearing before a U.S. magistrate judge in Alexandria, Va.

According to a survey by the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, 65 of 78 colleges with Division I athletic programs will have some type of drug testing for athletes in the coming school year. The Times-Dispatch survey included eight Division I conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big Eight, Southeastern, Southwest, Pac-10, Big East and Metro) and seven Virginia schools (Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth, Old Dominion, Virginia Military, George Mason, William & Mary and James Madison).

Without warning, a drum roll explodes in the darkness after midnight, echoing through the still barracks, jolting the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute out of their sleep. It is ominous and relentless, as urgent as it is foreboding. At every door of the four-story complex, there is a heavy knock, an order to fall out and, above the drumming, a shouted, repeated announcement: "Your Honor Court has met . . . Your Honor Court has met." In every room, the lights snap on.

All West Virginia's public schools were closed Wednesday for the rest of the week as more than 8,000 striking teachers swarmed the state Capitol to denounce Gov. Gaston Caperton's proposal to end their illegal weeklong walkout. "Things are just getting out of hand in terms of tempers," state school Supt. Hank Marockie said in shutting down schools in all 55 West Virginia counties today and Friday.

This spring will be remembered, by history junkies at least, for the opening of a major new institution, one named after a polarizing leader, devoted to a divisive period, subsidized by taxpayers and stationed in the South. I'm not talking about the presidential library of George W. Bush but the "presidential library" of Jefferson Davis, the one and only chief executive of the Confederate States of America, which will be dedicated Monday in Biloxi, Miss. The Davis library, of course, is not one of the 13 official libraries overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration.